SOINN artificial brain gets an upgrade, can use the Internet for self-enrichment

We constantly make jokes about how self-aware machines might one day rise up to destroy mankind. At this rate, who knows? It might happen. Hasegawa Group's Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN) is an artificial brain that can think like a human's. And this upgraded version also knows how to abuse the Internet to learn new things.

Announced in August 2011, Hasegawa Group's Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN) is what its makers call "an unsupervised online-learning method capable of incremental learning and does not require a predefined network structure." Technical jargon aside, this essentially means SOINN can learn new things little by little over time without any human intervention.

In previous experiments, a robot named HIRO, which operates on SOINN, could figure out how to pour you a glass of water without ever having been taught how. SOINN has gotten better since then, and the machine learning algorithm now has a few more tricks up its virtual sleeve. For example, even though it may not have seen images of a rickshaw previously, SOINN is smart enough to go online and make correlations between it and the features of a car in order to teach itself what a rickshaw is.

The research group in charge told Diginfo.tv that they might eventually be able to teach SOINN to make proper use of audio and video data.